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Servants weren’t supposed to talk about the mess that lords and ladies left behind, especially not in their presence. Bejde was worried about offending me, and it would be wise for her to learn not to do this again with another lady or lord. But my interest lay elsewhere.
“It’s okay,” I said thoughtfully. My mind was somewhere else.
Something didn’t make sense.
Something that...
“That was around the time Liltra died, was it not?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I remember because we used the same tools to clean her room. The soldiers do not care about cleanliness. They carry mud everywhere. I don’t blame them for leaving Liltra’s room that way. They had bigger things to worry about, and I get it... I would not bother with...”
“But it wasn’t them,” I thought out loud. “Her room had mud all over even before Seren found her.”
I remembered it clearly. There was dirt all over her floor as she dangled lifelessly from the ceiling. I had focused on it to avoid looking at her face.
“It was?” Bejde asked. “I would be surprised if that was the case. Liltra was always so clean. I know because I cleaned her room too. She wasn’t a maid, you see. She did not know how to...”
“Wait here,” I said, not bothering to let her blabber as I quickly got up to wear my cape over the simple dress I wore.
Bejde watched me in silent wonder as I left the room and entered the hallway. I hadn’t closed the door behind me. The sense of being on the precipice of something important was intense as I quickly went to Liltra’s room.
I opened the door wide and almost turned back.
There was nothing wrong with the room. Liltra was not here, but the memory of her dead body was fresh on my mind as I stopped for a second to catch my breath.
“Not going to be scared,” I whispered to myself under my breath. I took a step into the room and stopped.
I had seen this room only once before, and not properly even then. I had been too afraid to look at the room while Liltra was still in it.
Still, as I stood there, I realized that the memory of the room was fresh in my mind. I remembered the single bed on the other side of the room next to the window. The curtains weren’t drawn today and hadn’t been drawn that day, either. The bed faced a small closet that stood at its feet, and there was a ...
My eyes darted up to the ceiling where the little hook was. The hook to which Liltra had tied her sheet to hang herself. There had been dirt all over the floor, yet Liltra’s shoes had been neat and clean like all the other servants who only worked inside the castle.
My pulse raced as I stared at the little hook.
A vague thought was quickly forming in my mind, though I could still not put my finger on it. Orla had said it was odd for Liltra to keep her door unlocked even when she wanted to die in peace. It was strange that no one had heard her.
Did maid’s rooms have chandeliers? I did not think so. Back in Terlyth, the maids didn’t even have hearths in their rooms.
There wasn’t a hearth in Liltra’s room. So why would there be a hook for a chandelier?
I had to check. I left Liltra’s room and went straight to Seren’s door. She would not be in, but I had seen her wandering the halls of Winter Castle like a ghost and knew that it was likely for her to forget to lock her door.
I was right. Her door was unlocked.
I entered her room and knew that I was right again.
She did not have an empty hook hanging from the ceiling.
“How then?” I asked myself out loud.
There was something odd about this. Something that needed to be solved. I returned to Liltra’s room and climbed on her bed to better examine the hook.
It was as I thought. I did not know what it actually was, but the hook wasn’t made by a professional; that much was certain. It wasn’t smooth like all the other ironwork I’d seen in Qam, nor was it shaped properly like a hook.
Someone had made this in a rush.
Could it be Liltra? She was a fire elemental, that much I knew. She had worked in the fire rooms down in the basement. Fire elementals worked fire and could create heat; perhaps she had shaped it herself using magic.
